He hoped that would be the wedge he’d need with Pollard, but Pollard still said nothing. He just stared off into the fog, now and again squinting his eyes as if he were looking for something, suspicious of something.
“Whatever you’re looking for,” George said. “You won’t find it out there.”
That got the thinnest of smiles from Pollard. Other than that, his face was still dead as cemetery marble. His eyes were hollow, blank things which emoted about as much as bullet holes in driftwood. Now and then, his lips quivered as if there was something he really needed to say… but that was about it.
George gave it another shot. “What is it you hope to see out in that soup?”
Pollard said nothing.
Jesus, this guy. Getting into his head was like trying to pick a lock with a hairbrush.
“Do you know why I’m sitting here with you?”
That got Pollard’s attention. “Because they told you to.”
“You’re right,” George said. Maybe being truthful here was the proper tact. “Don’t take it the wrong way, I might have come chatted with you anyway… but, yeah, well, they’re worried about you.”
Pollard seemed unimpressed by that.
So George said, “I know Marx has been riding you like… how would he put it? Like a swayback mare? Like a five-dollar mule?”
Pollard almost smiled at that.
“Marx is a hard guy, I know that,” George said to him. “Gosling has his moments, too. But I wouldn’t be too quick to judge them or write them off as assholes. They’re dealing with all this the best way they know how, which is toughening up. They won’t allow weakness in themselves or others. Gosling told me you were in the Coast Guard once. Well, you know how it was in the Coasties, you know how those guys get bullying each other. It’s the same here.”
Pollard was looking at him now.
“Sure, think about it. Marx is a tough guy. That’s pretty easy to see just looking at him. Looks like he should be riding with the Hell’s Angels or one of those outlaw biker gangs. He’s not a guy I’d want to piss off. But you know what? You know why he’s riding you?” George asked. “It’s because he’s fucking scared. He’s scared like I’m scared and you’re scared. He just shows it different, is all.”
Pollard blinked his eyes. “I know.”
That was something. George worked it, thinking maybe when he got back – if he got back – he was going to get off the construction gangs and become a therapist. George Ryan, blue-collar therapist. The Dr. Phil of the working class. “Sure, you know. Marx is all wigged-out about you and you know why?”
“Because he’s scared?”
George shook his head. “Partly… but mostly because there’s only a handful of us. And me, you, Cushing, and Chesbro? We’re the meat of their command, Marx’s and Gosling’s. They need us as much as we need them. They’ve got some ideas on what we’re going to do here and I think they’re pretty good ideas, but without us, they’re screwed and they know it. They need us. And the idea that their command, their crew is disintegrating around them, well, that’s enough to put them over the edge. Do you see?”
George was just rolling with it, wasn’t even sure he believed everything he was saying, but, dammit, if it all didn’t sound pretty convincing. Regardless, it was enough to begin thawing Pollard a bit. And that was something.
Pollard didn’t say anything for a few moments, then, “I keep looking out there… I keep looking for Mike.”
“Mike?”
Pollard nodded. “Mike Makowyz. We called him ‘Macky’.” Pollard smiled for a moment at the memory of it. “Macky. He was my bunkmate. Me and Macky and another guy, we shared a cabin.”
“Did he go down with the ship?”
“No. We both made it off her okay… Mike’s arm, I think it was broken, but other than that he was okay.”
Pollard opened up then, like a flower he bloomed and let the sunlight in. And once he started, nothing could stop him: “We… me and Mike… we had lifejackets on, we were drifting on a crate. I don’t know how long. Only that we got into the weeds, the real weeds like here, before the rest of you. I don’t know why.”
“What… what happened to him?” George asked.
Pollard shook his head, his face sallow and drawn. “We were hearing things… things in the water, other things roaring out in the fog. Awful things. Big things moving out there and roaring… like some sort of prehistoric monsters. We were scared shitless. Mike was thinking we’d went through one of those time warps like in a movie he saw, that maybe we were trapped on the back side of the Jurassic or Triassic or one of those. I thought he was nuts at first, but then.. . well, those sounds, Jesus. I guess I was sort of expecting one of them monsters with the long necks and the big teeth… they got one in Chicago at the Museum there, thing’s gotta be seventy, eighty-feet long, has flippers like a whale… one of those things, those sea serpents to come gliding out of the fog and bite me in half. Christ, I don’t know what I was thinking. Just that I was scared shitless and I couldn’t believe any of it had happened. Maybe I still don’t.”
